Revive Thatcherism? No, Time to Move On

September 16, 2012

by Andrew Gimson  (09-12-12) @guardian.co.uk

Almost 22 years after she was forced from office by her own MPs, we still find it difficult to say farewell to Margaret Thatcher. The T-shirts about dancing on her grave that went on sale at the TUC conference in Brighton, and the launch within the Tory party of a group devoted to her brand of conservatism, are testimony to that.

It is true that only a few T-shirts were sold before they were withdrawn from the market because the trade unions and the Labour party were embarrassed by the tastelessness of their message. This suggests that hatred of Thatcher is not quite as widespread as it once was. My own guess – readers may care to correct me on this – is that T-shirts about dancing on Tony Blair’s grave would have sold a great deal better. For Blair was not just the man who took us into Iraq as George Bush’s junior partner. He was also the man who forced the Labour party to accept most of what Thatcher had done.

But the British press is nothing if not traditional. Its photographers went on searching the Conservative conference for ladies in hats for several decades after hats had ceased to be worn on that occasion. And as long as some marginal group can be found advertising its hatred of Thatcher at the TUC conference, that group can be confident of obtaining a quite disproportionate volume of publicity.

Liam Fox, the former Defence Secretary, has likewise managed to garner a certain amount of publicity by calling on the Tory party to learn a lesson from Thatcher and reinvent itself as a broad church. Some of us were under the impression that the Tories were a broader church when they were led by Harold Macmillan, and had imagined they got narrower under Thatcher.

But Fox suggests that in recent times the party has failed to connect with the aspirational voters who supported it under Thatcher, and perhaps he has a point. David Cameron’s liberal conservatism fails to excite the rising, self-reliant section of the working class in the way that the sale of council houses did. Cameron does not reach these people.

The difficulty from Fox (above)’s point of view is that Cameron’s three predecessors as Tory leader – Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague – were similarly unsuccessful, despite at times profiling themselves as Thatcherites.

It is desirable that the Tory party should be a broad church, but not at all clear how this is to be achieved. The danger of becoming more ideological is that this may put off more people than it attracts. But Cameron’s modernisation programme has run into the opposite problem: it seems so diffuse and ill-defined that it makes hardly anyone’s heart beat faster. Like the Anglican church, the Camerons sometimes strike one as almost too undogmatic; too reliant on a tradition of behaviour that is no longer generally shared.

No wonder there is a nostalgia for Thatcher. In her day, there were giants on the earth, and you had to decide whose side you were on. Boris Johnson, who was at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1983 to 1987, has said he became “conscious of right wing feelings” and “realised I had Tory tendencies” when he saw students at Oxford collecting money during the miners’ strike, which lasted from March 1984 to early 1985: “I was appalled by the way middle-class kids were going around supporting Arthur Scargill when it was quite obvious he was leading the poor miners to utter perdition and doing them no bloody good at all.”

Thank God we are no longer living in the 1980s, and can enjoy the luxury of just thinking about them. As Lord Salisbury said: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.” If Fox supposes that what worked then would work now, he is wrong.

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